It’s an outrage! Why it can be good to act mad

Science is starting to shed some light on the curiously continuous cycle of moral outrages.

There are big mysteries here. Why are some people so quick to moral outrage? Why are people set off by different triggers? Why does the shooting of a lion named Cecil last year spark outrage, but not any number of other animal deaths?

Psychologists say it all starts to make sense if you think of outrage as a form of display. Expressing it advertises a person’s views and allegiances to potential allies.

And the more popular a victim’s cause, the less risky it is to join in displaying your umbrage.

In an attempt to test this display hypothesis, psychologists at Yale created an outrage-provoking situation in the lab. One of two players was randomly handed some money to share with the other — or not.

The interesting part was the behaviour of a third party, who acted as a bystander. The bystander, if outraged enough by the tightwad behaviour of one of the players, could inflict “punishment” in the form of a fine.

The bystander gained nothing for it, and in fact had to pay to inflict the fine — and yet about 30 per cent of bystanders found it worth the cost.

But those punishers ended up profiting in the end: In a game geared to measure trust, the other players placed more trust in the bystanders who inflicted fines on the tightwads. The psychologists published their findings recently in the journal Nature.

Psychologist Jillian Jordan, who led the Yale experiment, said she wasn’t trying to suggest that people were faking outrage for the purpose of looking good.

She believes people genuinely feel the outrage. The point was to explain why so many have the urge to share it so ostentatiously.

In real-world cases, most people unconsciously tally costs and benefits, said Harvard psychologist Max Krasnow.

There is a cost to outrage, in terms of social risk. The cost shrinks when there are more and more people expressing it in solidarity. If you’re, say, the only person lobbing yogurt at the Icelandic Parliament in response to the Panama Papers — as protesters did this month — you might well get arrested.

But if you’re part of a teeming mob, your collective display of outrage can lead to the ousting of the prime minister.

Why do some incidents provoke almost universal outrage and others set off only those in certain age groups or of particular political leanings?

One of the most universal sources of outrage is stealing or hoarding resources, said psychologist Eric Pederson.

The theory is that this is ingrained in humans because our ancestors’ foraging cultures survived by sharing. If Joe helped himself to what others hunted and gathered, but then did not share his good fortune when he found berries or killed a wildebeest, he’d get in deep trouble.

Humanity’s deeply rooted antipathy for cheaters helps explain the recent outrage over tax evaders. But in other cases, said psychologist Robert Boyd, the definition of what’s outrageous is dictated by less objectively obvious cultural norms.

There is a social risk to outrage, says Harvard psychologist Max Krasnow, and the cost shrinks as more people get mad

Humans are wired to pick up cultural rules and norms, and to aim outrage at violators, he said.

Cultural norms vary by political leanings, geography and other factors. Often there’s a large generation gap.

Harvard’s Krasnow said it all comes back to the fact that displays are aimed at potential allies. An outraged person may have no personal tie to a given issue, but outrage can signal sympathy with those who do. This can be quite noble and selfless, not entirely self-serving; the two blur together in ways that allow human civilization to work to the extent that it does.

Are people outrage-impaired if they didn’t rail against the Cecil shooting, an infamously terrible Twitter joke about AIDS in Africa or how a Muslim passenger was recently kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight for speaking Arabic? Not necessarily.

“It’s a complicated game we’re playing,” Krasnow said, “and sometimes the best strategy is to say nothing.”